Unforgettable experience
The Weimar accordion duo con:trust wins the John Cage Award in Halberstadt
Weimar music students are at the cutting edge: a few days ago, the accordion duo con:trust won the John Cage Award in Halberstadt, which comes with a prize of €3,000. A total of 20 international soloists and ensembles were admitted to the contemporary music competition, which was founded in 2008 and was open to all instruments and chamber music ensembles. The competition took place from September 5 to 7 at the Cage House and Halberstadt Town Hall.
“There should be more competitions of this kind, because in addition to perfectionist excellence in interpretation, the focus is also on creativity and artistic diversity,” says Weimar accordion professor Claudia Buder. “The duo's wonderful success shows how they are progressing.”
Duo member Marius Staible is currently completing his concert exam with Professor Buder, while his fellow student Daniel Roth is already an alumnus of the Weimar accordion class.
As part of the competition, the duo con:trust played works by Uroš Rojko, Pauline Oliveros, Chen Shuhe Yue, and José Eduardo Muñoz. In addition, the accordionists also improvised according to artificial intelligence specifications, thus developing conceptual ideas.
A highlight of their program was the world premiere of the work “pressure&relief” for accordion duo and live electronics by Tim Helbig, who studied and also taught at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music (SeaM) in Weimar.
After two intense rounds of competition, the final of the “John Cage Award” took place in the town hall in Halberstadt. The final round was organized as a public concert. In addition to the duo con:trust, British singer Loré Lixenberg also won first prize.
“The competition was an unforgettable experience for us, as we felt like we were at the heart of the new music scene for a moment,” says accordionist Marius Staible. “It's incredibly inspiring to see so many people coming from all over the world and bringing music that you've never heard before.”
The accordion duo con:trust, founded in Weimar in 2016, consists of accordionists, composers, and educators Marius Staible and Daniel Roth. Staible and Roth are actively committed to the further development of the accordion and its literature.
Staible and Roth have premiered numerous works by national and international composers. They have performed at festivals and concert series such as the Kurt Weill Fest in Dessau, the Bachspiele in Leipzig, the Unerhörte Musik in Berlin, and the Kunstfest Weimar.
Marius Staible, who comes from Nuremberg, studied classical accordion and music education with Stephan Bahr and Prof. Claudia Buder, as well as music production and electroacoustics at SeaM in Weimar as part of the “Profil Neue Musik” program. His composition Unplugged³ (2017) has won several awards and has established itself as a compulsory piece for accordion competitions throughout Europe. In 2021, he won first prize at the international accordion competition in Vilnius.
Daniel Roth grew up in Saarland and studied accordion with Prof. Claudia Buder, Prof. Ivan Koval, and Prof. Veli Kujala in Weimar and Helsinki, as well as music theory with Prof. Jörn Arnecke and Marcus Aydintan in Weimar. Roth composes and arranges pieces for ensembles, students, and accordion performers. In 2023, he was awarded first prize in the Senior Variety category at the international accordion competition accordions-nous.org in Belgium.
In 2017, the duo con:trust won first prize at the two international chamber music competitions Val Tidone and Tino Anguissola Scotti in Italy. This was followed by concert tours to the Czech Republic and Israel, as well as performances at the Berlin Philharmonic.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Staible and Roth gained a large following on social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube through their audio recordings and video projects. The duo also released a CD featuring world premieres of lost compositions from Loheland Gymnastics. Their compositions have been broadcast on MDR Thüringen, Saarländischer Rundfunk, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
[10 September 10 2025]